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A Bengal Currie

A stew of mutton with onion, garlic, curry powder, butter, gravy, and tamarind or lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

A Bengal Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and cut the mutton into 1‑inch pieces, removing any bone or fat.

  2. Place the meat in a stewpan and add the fried onion and chopped garlic.

  3. Sprinkle the curry powder over the meat, using more for a hotter dish.

Stew and finish

  1. Brown the butter in a frying pan and pour it over the meat.

  2. Add enough gravy to cover the meat and let it stew gently for 2 hours.

  3. Add tamarind juice or lemon juice to achieve the desired acidity.

  4. Thicken the gravy and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + tamarindtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Garlic + tamarindtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together395 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Onion + tamarindtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together426 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long gentle stewing.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its characteristic aroma and heat.
Butter
Adds richness and a nutty flavour when browned before being poured over the meat.
Onion
Fried first to build sweetness and savoury depth in the base flavour.
Tamarind juice or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the rich, spiced gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 2 hours. Gentle, low heat lets the connective tissue in mutton break down slowly, so the meat becomes tender without drying out. Boiling hard toughens the muscle fibres and can make the gravy cloudy or reduce it unevenly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, butter, garlic, meat, tamarind):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, butter, garlic, meat, tamarind. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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